Thursday, January 31, 2013

Sad Truths

"Magda killed her six children in the Fuehurerbunker.
Our father loved his half-siblings very much. And when, like me, you
have something like this in your family history, you think: It can't be
any worse".Gabriele Quandt"It's a sad truth that forced labourers died in Quandt companies".Stefan Quandt

Six dead children. In the dying days of fascist Germany,
Hitler's underground bunker was crowded with his wife, their dog, six
children, their mother and step-father, a doctor and perhaps others. It
was the children's misfortune that their mother Magda Quandt,
in her second marriage gave them Joseph Goebbels as a step-father,
though he was a good father to them. Their mother, to prevent her
children falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army, killed
them with cyanide.

"My dear son!" she wrote to her son Harold Quandt, then a 23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe ... "By now we've been in the Fuehrerbunker
for six days already. Daddy, your six little siblings and I, to give
our national socialist lives the only possible honorable ending. Harold,
dear son, I want to give you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to
yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country!"

In 1914, paterfamilias Guenther Quandt, first husband
of Magda, invested in wartime profits at the onset of war with his
textile factories producing a quadrupled weekly uniform production for
the German army. He graduated to producing batteries, sewing machines
and silverware. "The Quandts business grew in the Kaiserreich, it grew during the Weimar Republic, it grew during the Second World War and it grew strongly after the war", according to Rudiger Jungluth, author of Die Quandts.

Guenther Quandt took as his second wife Magda Ritschel and their
son Harold was born in late 1921. Their marriage lasted until 1929,
when they divorced, and two years later Magda married Goebbels and
Hitler was best man at their wedding. Guenther Quandt joined the Nazi party when they took power in 1933, and Goebbels became propaganda minister.

The Quandt
factories became vital suppliers for the German war effort. They made
batteries for U-Boat subs and V-2 rocket launchers and Mauser firearms,
ammunition and anti-aircraft missiles. "He was one of the leading industrialists in the Third Reich and the Second World War", explained Professor Joachim Scholtyseck, a Bonn-based professor of history.

Guenther Quandt
appropriated assets from Jewish company owners. His son Herbert planned
a factory that would make use of slave labour. After his death Guenther's sons took ownership of his business empire. They increased the business stake in Daimler, and saved BMW from collapse as its largest shareholder.

Today the daughters of Harald Quandt
ages 61, 60, 58 and 50 have a net worth of $1.2-billion each. Quite the
family history; a business empire that grew on war munitions
production, that stole Jewish assets, that grew rich on slave labour. A
family that lives uneasily with their history of family collaboration
with Adolf Hitler and by that connection, the loss of scores ofmillions of lives, not the least that of 6-million Jews.

German history will always rankle with memory ofthe
Holocaust. This family's connections, and its wealth positively reek
with the stench of ill-gotten gains. If there was morality and remorse
those riches would be surrendered to charitable enterprises that would
attempt to make amends and restore hope in the hearts of the
downtrodden, the oppressed, the world's poor.

An investment in medical research, in education. Anything would be better than sitting on that odious wealth.

This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.